I sat in my car for awhile on June 2 on South Seneca Street and watched the demolition of my old stomping grounds, the Weedsport Theater. When I started to get a lump in my throat, I decided that I had seen enough. My association with the Zimmer family, who owned the theater and were also my employer for several years, made it too painful for me to watch any longer.
My first experience at the theater was when I was 10 years old. My brother Dave, two years younger, and I were each given a quarter on Saturday afternoons and allowed to walk uptown by ourselves to see whatever was showing. For 15 cents admission, you got to see a double feature, a couple of cartoons, a newsreel and perhaps a Pete Smith one-reeler. This left us with a dime to spend on freshly popped popcorn, or some of Grandpa Zimmer's delicious homemade ice cream, or a cold drink from the ornate marble soda fountain in the adjacent drug store, which was not only accessed from Seneca Street but from the theater lobby. Popcorn was 5 cents for a pretty big bag and ice cream cones were 5 cents for one scoop, or 10 cents for a double scoop. The upshot was for our quarter, we could live pretty high on the hog. On the opposite side of the lobby from the drugstore there was a workshop similar in size to the drug store where Grandpa Zimmer concocted his wonderful ice cream.
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As time went on, I became fast friends with the youngest of the Zimmer boys, Joe, and I hung out at the recreation center where there were four bowling alleys and as many pool tables. There were also pinball machines, a jukebox and a grill and sandwich area. The Zimmer family always wanted kids to hang out there, so they never sold alcoholic beverages. When I turned 14, I started setting pins a couple of nights a week in the bowling alley. One night after I had finished setting pins I was having a hamburger before walking home and Fred, the oldest Zimmer boy, came to me and asked me if I would like to work in the booth. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about — I thought that he meant the ticket booth, but I knew that the only Zimmer girl, Christine, generally was the one who sold tickets. "The projection booth," he said with more than a little exasperation. I couldn't say "yes" fast enough, so that was where I spent nearly every night and weekend for the next four years. It was a wonderful job for a student, as you might as well do your homework as you watch the same movie through the porthole a dozen times. A typical movie would have six or seven reels, and it would take about five minutes to rewind and thread the next reel, leaving more than 10 minutes of every 18-minute reel to be bored — so you might as well do homework.
Denny Randall
Adjacent to the projection booth and overlooking the marquee, which was out over the sidewalk on Seneca Street, was a beautiful little apartment that was occupied by Grandpa and Grandma Zimmer during the week. But when the Zimmer kids were available to help out on weekends, or when school was out, the grandparents retreated to their home in Syracuse. Eventually, when they retired, second-oldest son John married Betty Ann Huber from Syracuse and moved into the apartment, where they lived until son Scott was born and they moved to Centennial Street. I can remember lugging their stuff up those steep projection room stairs. Repairs to the large red neon vertical knife sign "WEEDSPORT THEATER" were made by crawling out one of the windows in the apartment onto the top of the marquee and erecting a ladder from there. I treasure all my memories of the bowling alley and the theater, but particularly the Zimmer family, who treated me so well for so long.
Let me finish with just one other story. The family owned a camp in Inlet, New York, on Fourth Lake in the Fulton chain of lakes. At the camp was a boathouse, and every spring on a day when everyone was out of school, all would pile into the huge Buick Estate Wagon, me included, and we would go up to the the camp and chop perhaps 4 feet of solid ice out of the boathouse so when it thawed it did not carry away the dock and/or the boathouse itself. It sounds like work, but it was fun!
Many of you know that I have been associated with the Empire State Theatre & Musical Instrument Museum at the state fairgrounds since 1967. One of the artifacts at the museum is a 35 MM Simplex projector exactly like the ones I ran at Zimmer's Weedsport Theater all those years ago. It cheered me up just writing this.
